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Distributed vSwitches on ESX4.0

We have been running Distributed vSwitches for almost 7 months and enjoy that they are much better in configuration and a lot easier to configure new hosts with.

Recommendations:
I put the vMotion portgroup and the Service Console on the distributed vSwitches, and it produces some phenomenal redundancy and helps with performance. I very much recommend putting the vMotion portgroup on these vSwitches, but not the Service Console. The sheer issues when the host cannot see the shared storage and therefore the Service Console is unavailable to connect to and an HA outage turns into an extended outage.

Recap:
use vMotion in distributed vSwitch
use a redundant standard vSwitch for the Service Console.

Ever wanted a way to ping an entire subnet and don't have access to a tool to do it? Well this one liner allows that.

The For at the beginning says the variable $i is equal to one, the semicolon separates it from the amount of times the loop is run 1..254 and then the $i++ increments the loop by 1. (You can specify every 5th IP if you want)

The next section runs the windows builtin ping.exe command (make sure you include the .EXE extension) with the switch -n (which means number of times) and then in brackets you are specifying the IP to ping. The where statement at the end is looking for a match of "bytes=32" default output for a successful ping.

I was working with VMware Update Manager and was running a scan on the entire VMguest infrastructure. Well the Update Manager service hung. I am not going to say anything more about that. :)

So I went to the UM server and attempted to restart the service. It sat in stop pending for quite awhile so I decided to kill the process. hmmm how do I do that? I was going to use powershell but the only cmdlet's available are to get- and stop- and restart-. All in the same token as going through the GUI.

Tasklist.exe /SVC
This displays all of the services running and their PID

Taskkill.exe /PID <PID #> /T
This terminates the service and child processes.

This killed the Update Scan on the VIclient and allowed me to restart the service.